BFI London Film Festival Lineup – Including The Pass With Russel Tovey

The BFI London Film Festival is a massive event showing 245 features across 12 days, and we now know the full lineup of films to expect for this year’s outing.

Before we get it into that, BFI also revealed a change in venue, as the Odeon West End closed meaning that the event lost a huge amount of seating capacity. This year, there will be a temporary cinema in Victoria Embankment Gardens which will hold 780 people.

One film I want to give special mention to is The Pass, staring Russell Tovey. This film has been a huge hit with the LGBT community, so be sure to check it out.
Moving swiftly on to the lineup, the films are broken up into Cult, Dare, Debate, Family, Journey, Laugh, Love, Sonic and Thrill with each strand being headlined with a gala.

Love: Mirzya, dir. Rakeysh Omprakash Mehra

Thrill: Bleed For This, dir. Ben Younger

Laugh: Toni Erdmann, dir. Maren Ade

Debate: Nocturama, dir. Bertrand Bonello

Cult: The Autopsy Of Jane Doe, dir. Andre Ovredal

Family: Trolls, dirs. Mike Mitchell, Walt Dohrn

Dare: The Handmaiden, dir. Park Chan-wook

Journey: Paterson, dir. Jim Jarmusch

Sonic: Chi-Raq, dir. Spike Lee

BFI’s 2016 London Film Festival will once again have twelve films competing in the Official Competition for the Best Film Award, whereas the winners of the First Feature and Documentary Competitions willreceive the Sutherland and Grierson Awards, respectively.

Official Competition Line-up

Brimstone, dir. Martin Koolhoven

Certain Women, dir. Kelly Reichardt

Clash, dir. Mohammad Diab

Elle, dir. Paul Verhoeven

Frantz, dir. Francois Ozon

Goldstone, dir. Ivan Sen

Layla M, dir. Mijke de Jong

Moonlight, dir. Barry Jenkins

Neruda, dir. Pablo Larrain

A Quiet Passion, dir. Terence Davies

Una, dir. Benedict Andrews

Your Name, dir. Makoto Shinkai

The Pass, with Russell Tovey & Arinze Kene.

First Feature Competition

Chameleon, dir. Jorge Riquelme Serrano

A Date For Mad Mary, dir. Darren Thornton

Divines, dir. Houda Benyamina

The Giant, dir. Johannes Nyholm

Hedi, dir. Mohamed Ben Attia

Lady Macbeth, dir. William Oldroyd

The Levelling, dir. Hope Dickson Leach

My Life As A Courgette, dir. Claude Barras

Playground, dir. Bartosz M Kowalski

Porto, dir. Gabe Klinger

Raw, dir. Julia Ducournau

What’s In The Darkness, dir. Wang Yichun

Wulu, dir. Daouda Coulibaly

Documentary Competition

All This Panic, dir. Jenny Gage

Chasing Asylum, dir. Eva Orner

David Lynch: The Art Life, dirs. Jon Nguyen, Olivia Neergaard-Holm

The Graduation, dir. Claire Simon

An Insignificant Man, dirs. Khushboo Ranka, Vinay Shukla

Lovetrue, dir. Alma Har’el

On Call, dir. Alice Diop

Safari, dir. Ulrich Seidl

The Space In Between – Marina Abramovic And Brazil, dir. Marco Del Fiol

Clare Stewart, LFF director, had this to say: “We are in a robust position as a festival,” said Clare Stewart. “We have been on a trajectory over the last four or five years of positioning the festival internationally as well as with local audiences, and changing the texture of how that plays out. We have been taking hold of that position we have in the calendar in relation to the awards season window and certainly our headline galas are playing more and more strongly into that.”

“The importance of London to our US Academy and BAFTA-voting audience has really changed the way our gala line-up is viewed internationally. But we have not strayed in pushing that focus from our interest in broadening and reaching wider audiences.”